Final Periodic Report / Financial Statement

When the final reporting period ends a session for preparing and submitting the final periodic report will open in the EC Portal. The following documents are required:

• technical part: upload Technical Report Part B, fill in online forms e.g. “Summary for Publication”, “Publications”, “Gender” etc.
• financial statements: online form which needs to be filled in by each beneficiary to report eligible costs.
• Certificate of the Financial Statement: a CFS is needed by a beneficiary if more than 984.849 € funding were transferred to transnational projects – eligible costs inserted in column “A1 Direct costs of providing financial support to third parties”; this is irrespective of any internal agreement on the distribution of top-up funding; the CFS needs to be uploaded
• summary financial statement including the request for payment: the statement is automatically created by the system and corresponds to the request for payment of the balance.

Final Periodic technical report: The project progress is usually reported by respective WP leaders and task leaders using the template provided by the EC. https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/gm/reporting/h2020-tmpl-report-eranet-cofund-pcp-ppi_en.pdf

Financial Statements: The Financial Statement covers the whole project duration. All beneficiaries have to submit the electronically signed financial statement, even if not participating in the co-funded call or not requesting unit costs. In these cases the amount to insert is ZERO. Only eligible costs shall be inserted in the electronic form, which are:

• the total transferred funding for the transnational projects (including top-up) but only the eligible one (no structural funds, no loans, no third countries) and only for the selected transnational projects from the co-funded call (not the none-co-funded ones).
• The number of units = number years, where the beneficiary were involved in additional activities

Certificate of the financial statement (CFS): For the final report a “Certificate on the Financial Statement” is required for each beneficiary eligible for more than 325.000 EURO EC funding. This is the case when a beneficiary spends more than 984.849 € funding for transnational projects (=eligible costs inserted in column “A1 Direct costs of providing financial support to third parties”). This requirement is independent from the internally agreed real use of the EC funding. The consortium can decide how to use the EC funding (“Black Box”). 

The CFS needs to be filled in by an auditor following the model provided by the EC. Section F of the model for CFS is related to the costs providing financial support to ERA-NET Cofund Third Parties meaning the final beneficiaries of the funded trans-national projects. Section G of the model is related to the direct coordination costs of additional activities and shows the auditor how to verify the number of units claimed under unit costs. The model CFS is available for download: http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/gm/reporting/h2020-tpl-annex5-cfs_en.docx 

ERA-LEARN provides FAQs on the Certificate on the Financial Statement for ERA-NET Cofund (only cash-based, no model C - where beneficiaries carry out the projects resulting from the call themselves ones): https://www.era-learn.eu/documents/cfs_eranetcofund.pdf

A webinar on final reporting was organised by ERA-LEARN. All slides are available for download. Here is the link to the event page.